Homicide investigators have identified an ex-con as a “person of interest” in last week’s triple homicide on the Las Vegas strip.
Ammar Harris, 26, was wanted in connection with the Thursday shooting on South Las Vegas Boulevard and Flamingo Road.
Tineesha Lashun Howard, also known as Yenesis Alfonzo, 22, from Miami, was identified as being inside of a black Range Rover at the time the shots were fired, police said.
Howard is 5 foot 8 and weighs about 120 pounds. She has green eyes and dark hair. She’s listed as missing and police believe she is in danger.
Police said Howard has a criminal history that includes arrests for soliciting prostitution, trespassing, possession of a stolen vehicle, and grand larceny.
A manhunt has widened to southeastern U.S. states for Harris, a former resident of South Carolina and Georgia.
He was convicted in Atlanta in 2005 of marijuana possession. He was arrested in Miami in December on a reckless driving charge, according to public records.
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Harris also was arrested in June 2010 in Las Vegas on pandering, kidnapping, sex assault and coercion charges stemming from allegations that he was a pimp. He sometimes goes by the name Ammar Asim Faruq Harris.
Investigators believe Harris was the driver and the gunman who fired shots from a black Range Rover SUV into a Maserati, killing an aspiring rapper and causing a crash and explosion that killed two people when a taxi exploded in a fireball before dawn Thursday at the heart of the Strip.
"We have him identified," Las Vegas police Capt. Chris Jones told the Associated Press. "Now the focus is on locating and apprehending him. We're getting help all over the place."
A SWAT team didn't find Harris at his home after the SUV was found parked Saturday in the garage of a gated apartment complex a couple of blocks east of the Strip.
The SUV had been sought as the getaway vehicle in the shooting and six-vehicle, chain-reaction crash on Las Vegas Boulevard near the Bellagio, Caesars Palace, Bally's and Flamingo resorts.
Kenneth Wayne Cherry Jr. was mortally wounded when the dark gray Maserati he was driving was peppered by gunfire from the SUV. Taxi driver Michael Boldon and passenger Sandra Sutton-Wasmund of Maple Valley, Wash., died in the taxi.
Police say the shooting stemmed from an altercation between Cherry and Harris in a valet area of the upscale Aria resort a block south of the crash scene at Las Vegas Boulevard and Flamingo Road.
A passenger in the Maserati was wounded in the arm, and four people from four other vehicles were treated for non-life-threatening injuries after the crash.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
